David Brooks and the Myth of the New Fair Society

Rest easy, America!
After our long march through the spiritless battle to prop up our
inflammable paper economy, David Brooks has identified the true
cause of our distemper: we have
been lulled into a terminal state of civic distrust by an
overly porous power elite.

Yes. The recruitment of our upper-class leaders has become more
demographically open, Brooks notes, with the old WASP establishment
giving way to a “meritocratic” scrum of other-than white male power
brokers. And as a result, “we’ve changed the criteria for success.
It is less important to be clubbable. It is more important to be
smart and hard-working.” But there’s a twist! “As we’ve made our
institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has
plummeted. We’ve increased the diversity and talent level of people
at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower.”

Brooks then dutifully ticks off what he regards as the evidence:
the financial system was run more smoothly a half-century ago, when
affable clubby “blue-bloods” manned-and we do mean manned-the
controls. (One can’t help suspecting that Brooks’ choice of 1960
and not, say, 1930 as the pertinent point of generational
comparison here, is a way of letting the grand old WASP Wall Street
era off with a Gentleman’s C.)

The last several decades have also seen the arts of government
and journalism launched into Bobo social distinction, with
reporters and government officials matriculating from elite
professional schools, and forfeiting the jolly solidarity-in the
case of the reporting caste-of a talent pool make up of
“working-class stiffs who filed stories and hit the bars.” As a
result of the promiscuous and confusing demotic rejiggering of
upward-tending achievement, the sober, Burkean gradualist outlook
of the old WASP leadership class has succumbed to the giddy virtues
of an ADD-afflicted credentialist elite, prizing “big swing” policy
goals like the health care overhaul, fetishizing “transparency” and
adopting rootless cosmopolitan “lifestyle habits” and “social
attitudes.”

While of course abjuring any suggestion of a return to the old
WASP order, Brooks can’t help but moan that the elite-trust crisis
bespeaks “some serious problems” with the new talent-based social
hierarchy.

This whole line of argument has, of course, been Brooks’ sturdy
stock-in-pundit trade ever since his stupendously overrated book
Bobos in Paradise catapulted him to his own elite renown
in 2000. And the catalog of error in Brooks’ impressionistic “comic
sociology” has only grown longer with the crashing failure of the
paper economy that Bobos unwittingly celebrated.

One can only gesture broadly at the cavernous dioramas of
fallacy and illogic on display here, but a good place to begin is
with this column’s woeful opening assertion that the C. Wright
Mills classic The Power Elite-published in 1956, the
putative heyday of balmy aristocratic management of the investment
economy-somehow chronicled the ongoing social dominance of WASP
primogeniture. Mills did argue that old family fortunes continued
to loom disproportionately over the country’s long-term wealth
profile-but more important, he maintained that the defining
structural features of the power elite arose from its mastery of
the technocratic military state created in the first flush of the
Cold War.

After all, he noted, the uniformity of social background in
members of the new power elite didn’t translate into a
straightforward defense of high-WASP tradition; nor was it the
case, Mills noted, that “if they were, as social-types,
representative of a cross-section of the population, that does not
mean that a balanced democracy of interest and power would
automatically be the going political fact…. Even if their
recruitment and formal training were more heterogeneous than they
are, these men would still be of a quite homogenous social type.”
In other words? Elite occupations now created their own dominant
social types, rather than flowing outward from old-boy networks of
social prestige.

Indeed, Mills’ adoption of the term “power elite”-which also
furnishes the title for Brooks’ column-was a conscious rejection of
old Marxist notions of classbound transmission of wealth and
interests across the generations, and an acknowledgement that
“power” was indeed the telling social distinction of the Cold War
era.

Hence the overlapping directorates of the military, the
corporations, and the government served, in Mills’ view, as the
most critical forcing beds of plutocratic interest. Mills’ power
elite got its marching orders from the impersonal mandates of the
government contract or corporate board-not via the exchange
of sly winks and elbow nudges at the Harvard Club.

It’s no accident that Brooks so fundamentally misconstrues the
point of the sociological treatise that lends his glib ruminations
the aura of elite introspection. The alleged midcentury fire sale
in WASP prestige is the great enabling myth of right-wing social
analysis, since it allows its chroniclers to pose as tolerant
meritocrats while continuing to engage the irresistibly lazy
ruling-class sport of bemoaning rampant cultural decline. Joseph
Epstein, Brooks’ forerunner in the counter-empirical conservative
sideline in “comic sociology,” has gone so far, in his 2002 book
Snobbery-a truly bracing study in casual conservative
misogyny and homophobia-as to liken the peaceful surrender of WASP
social power to the unilateral repeal of the British empire. This
strongly suggests that he understands neither sociology nor
imperial history.

And if one sets aside the allegedly earth-shaking erosion of
institutional WASPdom, what Brooks takes to be the all-too-dynamic
and Tocquevillian mass clamor for wealth and prestige in our age
swiftly recedes from the American scene like a poorly choreographed
flash mob. For while there may be more demographically diverse
hands at the machinery of wealth and power today, the contemporary
power elite is proportionally far smaller, and materially far
better endowed, than it was in Mills’ day.

Economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez found that from 2002
to 2006-basically, the last period of major expansion in the U.S.
economy-fully three-quarters of all income gains in these United
States went to the top 1% of earners; people making more than
$382,600.

What’s more, Piketty and Saez found that there’s a power elite
within that elite, with the narrowest .01% of earners
commanding 5.46% of the country’s income. As for wealth
inequality-the storehouse of stocks, bonds, real estate and other
assets that furnish the permanent advantage of the upper classes in
a way that a government affairs diploma never can-the picture is
even more grotesquely top heavy, with the top 1% of our population
possessing 34.6% of all privately held wealth in 2007, according to
the research of New York University economist Edward Wolff.

Subtract home values from that reckoning to measure financial
wealth, and things look worse still, with the 1% holding a full
42.7%. Meanwhile, the bottom 80% of Americans-basically wage and
salaried workers with minimal dividend wealth, usually marshaled
into volatile and insecure 401(k) plans-make
do with 15% of the nation’s wealth.

The five-year period of economic expansion that ended in 2007
marked the first such interval since World War II in which the
majority of Americans lost economic ground.

All sorts of compelling long-term implications for our social
order proceed from this eye-popping data-from narrowing educational
opportunities to spikes in infant mortality and long-term poverty.
The David Brookses of the world, however, would have us believe
that any effort-however anemic and cloture-strangled-to reform the
ghastly inequalities of our health care system alone is somehow the
“reckless behavior” of a jumpy and suggestible knowledge elite.

Or why not fret instead that since bank presidents may not live
in the same towns where their branches set up shop, and are more
likely to marry other bank presidents than their secretaries, like
they did back in the gradualist, conformist fifties, we are facing
a worrisome gap in “lifestyle patterns”? All of which makes the
wheezing, wearisome tap-dancing act of Brooks’ post-boom “comic
sociology” seem exponentially less amusing-if also a rather
enormous fucking joke.

Chris Lehmann is
definitely among the top 75% of income-earners in the whole United
States!